It is certainly a privilege, or a compensation for my 75 years, to have recently been invited, I, a non-academic (“not a doctor, just a graduate”, my uncle always said from that inferior stage in which my university career had ended), to two academic congresses: one, the congress “I saw clearly”, which took place at the Academia dei Licei, in Rome, in Camões, the other “Eça with north”, in Marco de Canaveses, at the Centro Cultural Emergente.
In the first one, I faced the academic majority alone, with an initial intervention, for which they called me “keynote speaker”; in the second I was at a colloquial and friendly round table with Mário Cláudio, Rui Vieira Nery and Ana Bárbara Pedrosa, (well) moderated by Jorge Sobrado.
If encountering Camões in Rome is encountering the great classical myths that are often the subtext of his poetry, encountering Eça in the Douro is encountering the city’s Lisboner (“Lisbon is Portugal”), who visits the fields of his homeland and tells us about them in “Cidade e as Serras”, which I continue to consider a work intentionally misread by those who defined it as an adherence to the stagnant ruralism of Salazarism. Just look at Jacinto’s indignation (Zé Fernandes is more used to it) at the miserable conditions in which the peasants live on those lands. But, as expected, this confrontation between the cosmopolitan city and the deep and rural Portugal could not fail to involve the classic confrontation (one speaker, using the football metaphor, called it “the classic of classics”) between Eça and Camilo.
It is easy to understand the rivalry: Eça is the writer of the “elites”, who have lived for generations in the permanent confrontation between the demands of modernity and the resistance of a society, which even fifty years ago was classified as a “dualist society in evolution” (Adérito Sedas Nunes), and who see themselves in the genius and diabolical caricature that Eça offers them. Camilo is not only the romantic writer of frustrated loves, as the vulgate tried to inculcate in us, but the greatest expression of a rural, illiterate, poor and religious country, which in the Maria da Fonte revolt manages to unite the defeated Miguelism with the September left in a popular movement of resistance to the liberal model, which clearly showed the difficulties of amending an old kingdom, which Ribeiro Sanches already denounced in the 18th century.
In Camilo we find the old country, which is that of the rural majority, clinging to tradition, in Eça the essentially urban and bourgeois elite who seek to keep pace with the European evolution of their time. To better understand our past, one and the other are indispensable. To find the pleasure of reading a great writer, Eça’s delicious, ironic and elaborate style will be more attractive on a first reading; but Camilo, who will perhaps take us longer to understand deeply, is equally a portentous writer, less entertaining, perhaps, but equally cruel.
Camões, to return to Rome, is the one who shows us the projection of the Portuguese outside their borders, which constitutes another essential feature of what we were and what we are, and which the great poet never fails to fiercely criticize, in their miseries and injustices. Camões is the poet of the “confusion of the world” and his ideological exaltation of Faith and Empire does not make him blind to the weaknesses and vileness that he also saw, clearly seen, without compromises or excuses.
And we returned to Lisbon. As much as we want to read about our time in the classics (and a lot of it is there) we cannot forget that we live in a society that is totally different in its material conditions and with very different risks to those we faced in the past. Revisiting ourselves (rightly) in the past cannot lead us to forget the profound differences that exist in present evils.
Diplomat and writer